


Detox

by kijilinn



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Depression, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/M, Mental Illness, Recovery, Trevor is dangerous, and I forget that sometimes, redemption arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-13 22:15:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14121975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kijilinn/pseuds/kijilinn
Summary: She picked me up like a stray dog. She didn't think it was an issue that the stray had fleas. The rabid part, though. That's when it gets interesting.**Takes place within the timeline of "Every day is Exactly the Same" from Trevor's point of view**





	1. Chapter 1

I don’t like to go back there. It isn’t fun looking at what you’ve done and having to accept that, no matter how much you hate it, you still did it. That’s part of me. It may be a really ugly part but it isn’t like mold on cheese where you can just cut it off and hope for the best. So, yeah. I did a lot of things right after Batgirl took me home that I’m not proud of. I don’t like remembering them.

I woke up that first morning without a stitch of clothing on and no idea where I was. I rolled over in that double bed and just got lost in this wave of sensations I couldn’t place: clean sheets, soft pillow, warmth, the weight of a blanket. The smell of coffee reached me, mingled with her scent on the pillow and in the sheets. I sat up and stared around me, slowly remembering where I was, what had happened. I remembered her, her body under mine and her arms around me. I sat on the edge of the bed. There was a pair of sweatpants folded on the floor with a t-shirt on top of them. I put them on.

I took a piss in her bathroom, confused by how clean everything seemed. Sure, there was hair in her tub and dust in her corners, but it was a long ways away from my place. I walked slowly around her bedroom, opened her closet and looked at her clothes, mostly work clothes with a few simple dresses and what looked like a bar wench costume. The shoes cluttered on her floor where almost entirely costume and looked like they hadn’t been touched in months. The red stilettos made me pause. Lots of nice mental images went with those.

There was a bookcase built into one wall and I stopped to look, mostly wondering if there was some cash hidden nearby. Scifi pulp novels, mostly, but she had a few books of folklore and world mythology and a beginners guide to Buddhism. A huge silver piggy bank acted as a bookend and I thought about shaking it. Instead, I turned to the open door and found my way down the hallway, past two open bedroom doors and into the main living area I remembered from the night before. 

She was sitting on the couch with her back to me. From the angle of her head, she was reading something in front of her and she sipped at a mug of coffee occasionally. I could snap her neck easy and be gone before anyone had a clue she was dead. I could probably do more than that if I really wanted to. 

“Good morning,” she said without turning her head. I blinked. “There’s coffee in the pot and cereal by the stove. I have bagels, too, if you’d rather.”

She turned her head to look at me and it hit me all over again that I had no idea why she had brought me home. I hadn’t been imagining her warm smile or the acceptance in her eyes, the way her hair fell across her face or the spray of freckles over her cheeks and forehead. I hadn’t conjured up the softness of her mouth or the way her body had moved under me, either. I hadn’t been hard when I woke up, which was a first in a long time for me, but I was getting there in a hurry now. Speechless, I just shrugged.

“How did you sleep?” she asked as she stood up and crossed the living room to pour me a cup of coffee. I shrugged again. She handed me the mug and pointed to the cream and sugar. I ignored them and sipped the coffee. It was just as good as the previous night. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want,” she told me as she leaned on her island. “If you stay, just don’t mess the place up too badly, okay? Pick up after yourself, shower at least twice a week, brush your teeth because your breath is rancid. Don’t make drugs here. I don’t care if you do them, just don’t make them here.” 

I took another drink of the coffee and watched her. She seemed completely genuine, just as she had the previous night. My body remembered her again and she smiled at me, her eyes angled slightly below the belt. “I don’t get it,” I said. “I’m just a gross old junkie. Why would you do this?”

“I told you last night,” she answered as she came closer to me. She set her mug on the island and stopped so she was so close that I could smell her skin. “I’m lonely and you’re lonely. We can be not lonely for a while together, so why not?”

“What if I’m a crazy psycho who kills you?”

She shrugged. “My insurance is paid and my family knows what to do.”

I stared at her. “What if I rape you?”

Her eyes never wavered. “You won’t.” She wasn’t wrong, but it bugged me that she was so confident. 

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

She was on the floor and I was ripping off her sweatpants, determined to prove her wrong because she didn’t know me, she couldn’t know me, I was my own person and I would show her how dangerous I really was. I would scare her, make her scream, make her reject me before I could really hurt her. I’d thought about it last night, but now I was committed. 

She didn’t scream. She gasped when her back hit the floor, grunted when her head bounced off the hardwood and her glasses flew backward off her face. Her hands reflexively came up when I pulled her pants off and then she stopped. She held still with her face to the side, her eyes closed. There was almost a peace on her face and it made me stop, too. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I growled at her. “Don’t you care? Don’t you care at all what I’m going to do?”

She slowly let out her breath without moving. Silent, she lay there and waited. When I still didn’t move to finish what I’d started, she said in a low, quiet voice, “I care. But if it will help you somehow, it’s okay.”

“Okay?” I demanded and pushed back against the floor so I could get to my knees again. “You’re okay with letting someone rape you in your own home?”

“It isn’t rape if I consent.” 

I stood up and stalked away from where she lay on the floor. I couldn’t help it: I started to pace. She didn’t make any sense. None of this made any sense. Angry and confused, I yelled something inarticulate and knocked over a few of her kitchen chairs before turning back to stare at her. She had reclaimed her pants but still sat on the floor, her arms hugged her knees. “Be afraid of me, dammit!” I shouted at her. “You don’t know what I could do. Hell, I don’t know what I could do. Why does this not bother you?”

Her smile stopped my rage short and I almost choked on it. “I’m a bystander in your story, Trevor. We’re all NPCs in someone else’s story. Most of us never get beyond the level of having one line that’s repeated over and over when the players interact with us. What happens to me is, ultimately, unimportant to you and your story. At most, I’ll be a flashback for you someday.”

My legs decided they were done with this bullshit and I dropped to my knees next to her kitchen table. It hurt and I squirmed until I was sitting cross-legged. “How can you say that?”

She shrugged. “It’s true.”

“What about your story?”

She grinned at me and I felt like crying. “You’ll be a memory for me, too. But nobody’s gonna play my video game. Too boring.” With a rock of her body, she stood up again and retrieved her coffee. She paused, then picked up my mug, too. She crossed the distance between us and held it out to me. “Bagel or cereal?”

“Cereal,” I found myself whispering as I took the mug back. She returned to the counter and I stood up again. “You’re the strangest bitch I’ve ever met, you know that?”

“At least I’m a memorable NPC.” 

“You seriously don’t care if I do drugs and live in your house.” 

She glanced at me over her shoulder and shrugged. “I care,” she said softly. “I could do without the police calls, but I’ll bail you out if you need me to. I live pretty simply because I don’t make much and what I have all pretty much goes into keeping the house. It would be easier for me if you didn’t accrue legal fees every six months.”

I drank my coffee, more to keep from staring at her openly. It was one of those situations where it has to be too good to be true. Sex, a place to live, food, sex, permission to keep on with my own activities, someone to make me look legit, sex… She put the bowl of Cheerios in front of me on the island and handed me a spoon. “I don’t cook,” I informed her finally and took a bite.

“That’s fine.”

“All my marketable skills are drug-related.”

She chuckled. “That’s okay, too.”

I ate a few more spoonfuls and then looked at her quizzically. “You’re not gonna make me do a bunch of weird stuff for a webcam, right?”

“Only if you want to,” she grinned.

“Church?”

“I don’t even go.” After a few more long seconds of silence, she circled the island and stopped near my shoulder. I looked down at her and swallowed my current mouthful.  “Trevor, I’m really serious. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

“What do you get from all of this?” I asked her. 

Again, she smiled and it made my chest hurt. “Can I show you?” When I shrugged and nodded, she put her hand on my arm and turned me towards her. She slipped her arms around my middle and pressed her cheek against my chest. With the hand not holding the spoon, I hugged her more out of instinct than anything else. She took a long, deep breath and let it out again, her shoulders relaxing and I felt something tense going out of me, too. “I’m touch-starved,” she whispered. “I just… want someone around.”

“Why me?” I put the spoon in the bowl and wrapped my other arm around her. I would be lying if I said it didn’t feel good to hold someone. “It can’t just be the accent.”

She chuckled without lifting her head. “You seem low-maintenance.”

I snorted. “Get a dog, lady.”

 

***

 

I spent all day watching her. She spent most of the day curled up on the couch in her pajamas watching Netflix horror movies. After the third shitty possession movie, I flopped down next to her. “They have any of the Hellraisers on there?” 

“They brought the first two back about a month ago.” She flipped through the selection menu until she found the first movie, then looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “You want lunch?”

“Sure, if I don’t have to catch it and kill it myself.” 

“More coffee?”

“Unless you’ve got some crystal hidden somewhere.”

“Coffee, then.” She stood up and went to the kitchen as the movie started to auto-play from the menu. 

I had meant the comment as a joke, but by the time she had brought me another cup of coffee and a turkey sandwich, my own joke wasn’t funny anymore. I had needed a hit when she found me yesterday and that was more than twelve hours ago. I was starting to feel lightheaded and sluggish and the low, slow voice that usually came with sobriety was starting to whisper in the back of my head again. “Where does a guy go for fun around here?”

She looked at me quietly and shrugged. “If you’re asking where to find drugs, I really can’t help you there. Being in the same* room as you is probably the height of my contact with illicit substances.”

I frowned and considered what that meant. “Can I borrow your car?” It surprised me that I was asking instead of demanding. Making nice to the lady who paid the bills made sense, I suppose. 

“Can you keep from getting caught?” She folded herself into the couch again and watched me with her sandwich on a paper towel balanced on her knees. I nodded. “Will you come back?”

That part caught me off guard and I stopped to think about it. She wasn’t holding me here, obviously. I could leave anytime. She’d done nothing but feed me, bathe me, clothe me and fuck me since I got here. No matter how weird the situation was, it was still a choice set up. “Yeah,” I said. 

“Do you have money?”

“Enough to get what I need.” For now, anyway. 

“Fill the car before you come back.” She snuggled back under a blanket and turned back to the movie. “Keys are on the table.”

 

***

 

I came back feeling more like myself, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. My senses were all blown out again and I was itching for something to do. Maybe even someone to do. I took a walk around the fields that surrounded her house, wondering how much of it was hers. There was a barn with a bunch of junk abandoned outside it, so I dug down there and made a stash. She didn’t want it at the house, that was fine. As long as I had it. I had managed to find a guy who would sell me enough to last for a few weeks as long as I took it easy. Not like I’m good at taking it easy on anything, but I figured things would go smoother if I wasn’t constantly leaving for more.

Back at the house, she had fallen asleep watching the second Hellraiser movie and I realized I’d been gone longer than I thought. Time’s weird sometimes. I slammed the door and she jumped, eyes wide. “Honey, I’m home!” She seemed to move in slow motion as she got up from the couch and walked toward the partition between kitchen and living room. She turned on a light and I blinked in surprise. Even in slow motion, she was hot as hell. I followed her and pulled her by her hips towards me. “C’mere. Daddy needs a kiss.”

“Oh, one more rule,” she said with a wary smile. “Daddy gets jack shit if he calls himself that.” 

It was a joke. It was even mildly funny. I managed a grin before the darker side caught up. I slammed her up against the wall of the hallway, my arm over her throat as she gasped. “Daddy’ll call himself whatever the fuck he wants, sweetheart.” I groped her tit for good measure before letting her go and she leaned on the wall, her face pale and her breath ragged. “Remember this,” I told her quietly. “Remember that you’re the one who let the rabid dog in.”

Netflix and chill was out of the question after that. Her mood seemed shaken, which I found very satisfying after the confusion of the morning and previous night. I couldn’t hold still, so I paced the house, poked my nose into lots of places that probably hadn’t seen activity since the house was built. She stayed out of my way for the most part. 

I was cock deep in some stored shit in the attic when she called up to me, “Trevor? I’m going to bed. I need to work tomorrow.”

“Want a good-night fuck?”

The following silence surprised me, but she eventually answered, “I think I’m okay. Unless you want to.”

“Naw, I’m good.”

“Good night.”

As she retreated, I stuck my head out of the attic access and watched her as she closed her bedroom door. “Good night.” Enough time had passed since the last hit that I had calmed down. I wasn’t tired by a long shot, but it was letting me think about my actions a little more. Enough to feel a little guilty. She had opened her home and I was making this hard for her. She didn’t have to do any of it, but she was anyway. Here I was, rooting through her stored memories and winter sweaters like I’d been invited. Some of those memories had triggered a few of my own, too. She’d had a cushy life, that much was obvious from the happy little second and third-grade school pictures. The dark parts crept in around the edges in her journals, though. Yeah, I read them. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did and wasn’t thinking about what it might mean later. Later wasn’t even close to being on my mind.

I read about her parents’ divorce and her calm acceptance of it. I read about her darkening confusion about who she was, where she belonged, the continuing loss of self as she hopped restlessly from house to house. I read the good parts, too but the dark parts were more familiar. They sounded like mine. When she wrote page after page of reasons why her family would be better off if she died, I finally closed the book and put it away. The buzz couldn’t kill this hurt in my chest, so I climbed down the access ladder and went to her bedroom door. I could hear her breathing on the other side, asleep. I should leave her alone. But I didn’t want to.

I opened the door quietly and closed it after me, shed my clothes in a heap by the bed and crawled under the blankets next to her. She shifted at my movement, coming awake enough to acknowledge that she wasn’t alone. I touched her side, running my hand down her soft skin under the blanket and she sighed, leaning closer to me. After a moment, she crawled closer and snuggled up against my chest. I put my arm around her and held her, thinking about all the things that wouldn’t exist if she had killed herself in high school. 

I fell asleep grateful she was alive.


	2. Chapter 2

She got up. She went to work. I asked her to kiss me and she did, then reminded me about the hygiene rules. When she was gone, I showered. When I got out, I looked in the mirror at the shitheel who was living in her house and looked around until I found shaving cream and a razor. It was strawberry-scented shaving foam and the razor was pink and curvy, but I didn’t care. There was a new toothbrush still in its wrapper on the sink. I brushed my teeth.

I walked around her empty house, feeling strange. I made more coffee. Well, I tried to. I probably wasted three pots before I figured it out. I made myself a sandwich. I thought about the stash by the barn and dismissed it. I didn’t need anything yet. 

I sat down and watched Netflix. 

She only had the one car, so I couldn’t really get anywhere unless I walked and it was a good ten miles to the nearest little town. I’d driven farther the previous night for my fix. I walked around in her fields, checked on my stash, explored back into the woods behind her house. I found an overgrown hutch of some kind that probably had been for chickens or something years ago. I found a bush with some surprisingly exotic-looking flowers in bright pink. 

And that’s how my days went. 

For almost a month I lived this bizarre domestic homelife with this woman who wanted nothing from me but someone in her house. If I didn’t feel like talking, we didn’t talk. She did her thing and didn’t require that I join her. I did my thing and she didn’t intrude. 

It wasn’t always quiet and peaceful. It wasn’t always easy on either of us. Looking back, I think it was harder on her but I tend to blame myself for everything that goes wrong even now that I’m better balanced. Batgirl says that it was hard on both of us for different reasons, that we can’t really compare because she wasn’t going through detox and I wasn’t trying to do damage control on a violent addict I’d brought home.

The boredom was horrible. Maybe not the worst, but it gnawed on me. Every time she left, I was there by myself with nobody to talk to but me and the voices in my head. I think it was about a week in that I realized that there was a new one in there: hers. Now, I’ve been certified non-schizophrenic so it wasn’t that kind of voice. They were all just the kind of deep inner monologue I think a lot of people have and take for granted. Mine just happened to sound like different people: Batgirl, Mikey, my brother, my father. Considering my father left when I was six, that one was pretty impressive if it was a memory at all. He was the voice of every disappointment. Everything I did wrong, everything I fucked up was narrated in that voice with this sense of the inevitable. Of course I would fuck up because that’s what I do. I didn’t have other options.

Once her voice was in the mix, it was like I had her constantly in my head with a baseball bat beating the living shit out of my negative voices. Maybe it was the novelty of this calm, otherwise pacificistic librarian beating the shit out of men twice her size, but I enjoyed having her there. When I found out she used to do martial arts, the baseball bat turned into a fucking katana which was even more satisfying. It was strange: she was always on my side. My voices tend to turn on me, even if they start out just being someone to talk to. That happened when Mikey died and I started hearing him. That was hard. The only reason I’m still alive is the conflict between Michael’s suicidal suggestions and my father’s brutal voice telling me suicide was too good for me, that I deserved to live and suffer.

Just like the real thing, Batgirl just smiled at me and said I was worth saving. 

 

She came home in a mood one night maybe two, three weeks after I started living there. She opened the door and I waved without standing up from the couch where I was watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies. She didn’t respond, which was pretty unusual. I heard her drop her stuff by the door and head for the bathroom. She usually showered immediately after getting home like she was purging herself of little kid slime and old people germs. Sometimes she let me join her. I was feeling a little randy and hopeful, so I followed her and called, “Want company?”

“I don’t think so,” she answered. “Not today.”

I was just coming down off the euphoria from my last hit a few hours ago--which explained the passive watching of fantasy orcs: I tend to have very little energy in that space between the high and the next craving. At first, her words barely even registered as English and then I started to see red. What had been just hopeful before was angry and entitled now. “What, you have a headache?” I half-snarled at her and pulled back the shower curtain.

“Trevor!” she yelped and I think it was the most afraid I’d seen her. Her eyes were wide and at the time, I didn’t realize how terrifying I could be to a girl who was almost blind. She scrambled a little and almost fell, but I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up. It wasn’t a gentle save. “You’re hurting me,” she said in a small voice.

“Am I?” I growled back. “Good. Maybe you’ll pay attention.” I pulled off my shirt and dropped it, then kicked out of my pants and climbed into the shower with her. “You listening?”

“I’m usually listening,” she replied in that same small voice.

“I’m sick of the teasing,” I snapped. “Will she, won’t she? Gotta wait for the right fucking mood.” I drew out the word sarcastically and half-spun her around so she had her back to me. I pushed on her back and she gasped, putting out her hands to keep from falling forward and her feet kicking a little, sliding. “I. Want.” I thrust against her. I wasn’t hard so the whole thing was kind of a farce, but that wasn’t the point of it anyway. I repeated the move a few more times for emphasis, expecting at least a sound of protest. 

She did it to me again, though. She went compliant. She braced herself against the wall and let her head hang, rotated her hips back to lift her ass and waited. She fucking waited for me to do what I was gonna do. 

This time I was too close on a high, though. “Fuck!” Rage half-blinded me and I pushed her hard. She stumbled out of the shower and lost her footing, landed on the linoleum with her hands out to catch her. She skidded and there was blood on the floor. I came out after her and shoved her with my foot--I did not kick her. Even shit-crazy, there are some things I won’t do. “What the fuck is wrong with you!” I screamed at her and she rolled on her side, curling into a ball with her hands over her face and head. “Won’t you even fight back!? C’mon, bitch, the psycho’s coming and you’re just gonna lie there?”

She was silent. She waited. 

I raged at her. I said things I don’t want to repeat. I threatened to hit her. I threatened to kill her. She just waited until I was done. I stood there over her in the hallway, breathing hard and my rage mostly spent, both of us naked and the shower still spraying water onto the bathroom floor. As the rage receded, I saw what I had done. I heard my father’s knowing laughter when I stood back and let myself breathe normally again.  _ Everyone deserves to be clean _ , her voice whispered in my head and I turned away and went to the shower. I turned off the water, dropped a towel on the floor for the spillage. I took a dry towel and knelt beside her where she curled on the floor of the hallway. “Why do you let me do that?” I asked her as I covered her with the towel. “You know self-defense. You could keep me from ever touching you. Why?”

“If it’s helpful to you,” she whispered as she sat up again, “it’s okay.” She wouldn’t look at me, though and I felt my guilt like a hollow drum beating in my ears. 

I reached to take her hands and turned them over, showing the raw, scraped skin. I had done that. “Where’s the first aid?” I asked her quietly.

“Under the sink.” 

I collected the bag of bandages and burn cream. I helped her sit up so her back was against the wall, then tucked the towel around her. She was starting to shiver. I cleaned her scraped hands, apologized every time she winced from the antiseptic.  _ You should have killed her. At least then you wouldn’t feel guilty when she looks at you,  _ Michael whispered at me this time. I brushed him away. I covered the scrapes, then started on her knees. Her shins and hips were already starting to bruise, livid blue-black against her pale skin. Her hip and her arm had my finger marks on them. I saw that she had broken off a toenail in the fall and I couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t screamed. I cleaned the toe and wrapped it carefully. When I was done, I sat down hard on the floor and covered my face with my hands. “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t answer. I closed my eyes behind my hands. I felt like I had broken something. I suppose I had, in a way. She let me sit there in silence. After a moment, she stood up and I lifted my head to watch her. With the tips of her fingers, she steadied herself on my shoulder, then returned to the bathroom to retrieve her glasses. She walked back past me without stopping, but her fingertips brushed my shoulder again as she passed, deliberate and gentle. I stared after her as she walked down the hallway to her bedroom, vanished inside and closed the door after her. In the breath of her passing, I heard something sigh,  _ Was it helpful? _

 

It was the first time I apologized. 

 

***

 

After that, every time I went out to the stash to get a hit, I felt guilty doing it. I went out wondering if I would hurt her again. I came back in feeling unbalanced, the high soured by my own confusion. I started trying to push out my doses, to stretch the time between them farther and farther. I tried doing half-doses, told myself it was to make it last longer. Her voice whispered that I knew better. Half-doses made the rage easier to manage even if the high wasn’t as satisfying. 

I found myself watching her in strange moments. Paused over the kitchen sink while she was doing the dishes. Hopping to get one sock on her foot without sitting down. She sang sometimes when she was feeling good and didn’t think I could hear. Or maybe she just didn’t care if I heard. I caught her air guitaring to the Eagles once and I thought she’d die of embarrassment. As I watched her in these strange little slices of her life, I realized she didn’t smile as much when I was high. She wasn’t actively upset, wasn’t obviously afraid. She just didn’t smile. I started to miss her smile.

I didn’t know what to think when I figured out that even though she preferred that I ask for things rather than demanding--which only made good sense--she would still give it to me if I demanded. How I asked didn’t influence how she treated the root of the question. If I wanted something she could provide, she gave it freely even if it hurt her to do it. 

“Do you even have limits?” I found myself asking her one evening. She had a glass of wine tucked between her thighs while she worked on something on her laptop. Her eyes came up from the screen to look at me and she paused to take a sip. “I mean, you said no cooking and that’s fine and you asked me not to burn the house down. Other than that, you’ve done everything I asked you to and a shitton of things I didn’t ask for.” I couldn’t keep my eyes on her face as I said it; the spectre of what I had done in the shower still bothered me. The bruise on her hip still showed my fingers.

“If it’s something that will help you,” she said quietly, “I can at least consider it. There are things I’d rather not do, but in the end if it’s useful and I’m physically capable of doing it, I don’t see a reason not to.”

“Useful.” I slowly shook my head and sank deeper into the cushion. “How is letting someone hit you useful? How is being raped useful?”

“Everyone defines useful in their own terms,” she said with a shrug. “Those things aren’t necessarily useful or enjoyable for me, but if I can fill someone else’s need--”

“I don’t need to rape you to have sex with you.”

“No,” she agreed. “You don’t. You and I both know that rape is seldom about sex.”

“How would my raping you be useful to me?”

She smiled and shrugged slowly. “You haven’t yet. I would assume it isn’t. The threat of rape, though, has been useful.” When I opened my mouth, she shook her head quickly and said, “Don’t deny it, Trevor. It has. Reminding me that you could rape me if you wanted to acts as a threat, a reminder that you’re dangerous and I’m supposed to be afraid of you. It acts as a reminder for yourself, too. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like you’re reminding yourself that your being dangerous means you don’t belong here. Like you’re reminding yourself not to get comfortable.”

I grunted and crossed my arms over my chest. She wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t like to think I was that transparent. When I threatened her, I was repeating to myself all the reasons I shouldn't be there. Even if she thought it was okay I was there, I could keep myself from settling in. Something ached in my chest and I closed my eyes, rubbed my palms against my thighs, trying to banish the feeling. It wasn’t withdrawal just yet; I still had a good eight more hours before that started to be an issue. I just wasn’t happy.

Movement drew my attention and I watched her stand up from where she was, set aside the computer and her glass of wine. She came closer and settled next to me on the couch, waiting. “I saw that,” she whispered and her hand rested gently on my thigh. 

“Saw what?” I grumbled without looking at her.

“You need something.”

I glared. “No, I don’t.” She was close, her hip gently pressed into mine and her warmth seeping into me. I ached to snuggle into that warmth and stop thinking for a while. I wasn’t about to tell her that, though.

“Well,” she sighed, “I need something.” Before I could protest, she crawled up next to me and pressed herself under my arm, wrapped her arms around my chest and buried her face in my shoulder. “Hold me?” she asked.

I wanted to deny her that. I wanted to push her away. I wanted to tell her all the reasons she shouldn’t want to touch me. And I thought about it: how would pushing her away be useful? It would keep me from taking comfort in her touch just as much as it would deny her what she needed. I chewed my lip. Now that I had thought about it, I couldn’t look away from the fact that I wanted to hold her. I wanted that comfort, too. Refusing would hurt us both, make us both uncomfortable. Misery loves company and I deserved to be miserable. But did she?

I wrapped myself around her. The ache in my chest and the itch in my palms faded as I rubbed my hands over her shoulder, down her arm, over her back. She wriggled in my arms until she had her face pressed into my neck and she sighed, relaxing completely. “You’re crazy,” I told her quietly and she nodded. Or maybe she just nuzzled my neck. It was hard to tell. “How can you relax with someone who’s dangerous? Who’s threatened to hurt you?” She didn’t respond and I hugged her tighter. “Someone who has hurt you?”

Her hand spread on my chest and she stroked her fingers over my shirt slowly. “Was hurting me useful?”

“No.”

“Did you get something from it?”

I glowered at her. “I hate that I did it. I hate it when men hurt women. I didn’t get anything fucking useful or interesting from it except the fact that you will let me hit you and I don’t know why.”

She was quiet for a long time, then whispered, “You did something and realized you don’t like doing it.” When I grunted an affirmative, she said, “So it taught you something about yourself. That’s useful.”

“And if I did like doing it?” I growled.

“Then you got pleasure from it. The ultimate in usefulness.”

I twitched under her hand and felt her press herself closer, like she was afraid I would pull away. “What about you?” I finally asked the question that had been burning in my throat like a half-swallowed pill. 

“What about me?”

“Was my hitting you fucking useful?” I realized I was hugging her harder than I had intended and released my arms so she could breathe more easily. “Did you enjoy it?”

She smiled at me. My Bee. She wasn’t mine yet, but that smile is what seems to link all the versions of her I know together. “My purpose was to be useful to you,” she said softly. “If you gained something useful, then my purpose was served.”

Frustration and pain radiated out of my chest and I looked at her helplessly. “Your purpose. You’re so much more than that, though. You’ve got a whole life outside of this. How can you say your purpose has anything to do with me? Was feminism just something that happened to other people for you?”

She chuckled and ran her hand down my cheek. “I define my own purpose,” she murmured. “No one defines it for me. I prefer my purpose small, manageable. Achievable. It makes me happier to look at my day and say that I fulfilled my purpose for the day, rather than feeling like I’ve failed to achieve it in the greater sense. When I’m with you, my purpose is to help you. To be useful to you. I would like to enjoy your company but that really is secondary to the first part. If being useful isn’t fun for me, I’ll still choose to be useful.” 

“I don’t think I’m ever gonna understand you.”

“Would understanding be useful?” she murmured near my ear.

I pulled her closer to kiss her. “Yeah,” I whispered. “I hate feeling dumb.”

“Something to work on, then.” 


	3. Chapter 3

I really did want to understand her. It was strange to me that figuring out the way her mind worked seemed to help me understand my own. Her acceptance of being passive, a tool for others to act on was at complete odds with my own desperate need to make an impact. The harder I tried to force her to react, the more she submitted to neutrality. When I was high, it was infuriating. When I was sober, it was surprisingly sexy. **  
**

I started to want to be sober more. She made more sense when I was clear-headed and I liked that feeling. If it hadn’t been for the cravings and the depression, I might have gone clean sooner but I was still running from my father’s voice, still chasing the high.

The voices were always worse when I had pushed the dosage too far. As badly as I wanted to be able to understand and talk clearly with Batgirl, those voices were enough to make me want to hide. They didn’t always come when I was awake, either.

One night was particularly bad. I hadn’t had anything for almost 48 hours and was trying to hold off until the following afternoon for another hit, but the creeping nightmares tangled me up in stuff so much worse than the risk of hurting my host. I must have woken her up because I jerked awake to find her sitting on the side of my bed, the one in the spare bedroom. She had one hand on my shin and was watching my face with concern. “Who’s Ryan?”

I groaned and rolled over, pulled the blankets over my head. I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to be breathing right now, not after the nightmare I had just shaken off.  _Kill her,_  his voice hissed.  _You know you want to. You’ve wanted to since you first fucking looked at her. Choke her. She’d even let you. Just get up, throw her down and choke her until she stops bothering you. You’ll get so hard doing it._  I grunted quietly and pulled the pillow down tightly to my face.

“It’s okay,” I distantly heard her say and her hand ran over my calf, gentle and reassuring. “I thought you might want to talk about it. You don’t have to. You sounded upset.”

“Go away.” The bed shifted as she stood and started to walk away.  _Don’t let her go. Don’t let her turn her back on you._  I couldn’t stand it. I threw the blankets off and followed her. “Wait.” She stopped and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were tired, but she still welcomed me when I put my hand on her arm. My mouth worked, trying to find the words I needed.  _I want to kill you. I want to fucking strangle you and watch you die. I want to fuck your dead body and know you’re destroyed because of me. I want to obliterate you._ “I need you.”

“I’m here.” She turned back to face me and I ran my hand along her jaw, watched her eyes close as she leaned into my touch. My thumb paused over her pulse and his voice growled, roared in my head. She would let me kill her. I knew she would.

I pulled her against me and I kissed her. She melted, her mouth so warm and soft as her arms came up around my shoulders. I ran my hands down her sides and around to her lower back, drawing her even closer. There was a revolt happening in my head, but I could hear her voice more clearly than the violent, savage roaring:  _It’s okay to need something. I absolve you of guilt, Trevor._  I chased her peace, craved her sense of gentle purpose and balance in a world that made no sense. I kissed her harder and she sighed, leaning into me. “Don’t let me think,” I begged her. “Make my head silent. Please.”

She steered me at my bed and we tumbled together. The nearness of her felt like the white noise static of an empty television channel and I threw myself into it. She whispered against my skin as she rolled me onto my back and straddled me. Pajamas still separated us, but her movement was enough and I groaned. The more she touched me, the more she kissed me the less I could hear that angry roar. I gasped her name–her real name–and she covered my mouth with hers again, silencing me. When I couldn’t take any more, my back arched and I growled out my release as she pressed her face hard into my neck, riding my movements until I slumped back against the bed.

“My brother,” I whispered once I’d found my breath again. She graced my neck with small, gentle kisses and I closed my eyes, just feeling her there. “He’s bad in all the ways I’m not.” I felt her head tilt curiously, then her nose slowly trailed against my cheek, just staying close without speaking. “He hurts people because it’s fun. He enjoys it. He likes hurting kids and women and animals. He’s…” I trailed off because the only word I could think of was “crazy” and it wasn’t accurate. I settled on: “Dangerous.”

She shifted and kissed my neck again, then along my jaw. “You aren’t him,” she whispered and I closed my eyes. I hugged her tighter to me. I wanted to beg her to say it again. I needed that more than I had realized. “You aren’t,” she continued softly. “You are dangerous, there’s no denying that, but you aren’t him. You aren’t sadistic. You don’t enjoy inflicting pain.”

“No,” I whispered back and let out a long breath. “No, I don’t. It still happens, but I don’t enjoy it.”  _Kill her. It’ll feel so good._  “No.” I hadn’t meant to answer him aloud, but I did and I felt her shift again. Her hand ran slowly along my face and I hugged her again. “Stay?”

“If you want.” When I nodded, I felt her lips smile against my skin and she settled beside me, her head on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

I chuckled and shook my head slowly. “I am the polar opposite of okay, Batgirl. But I’ll survive the night.”  _And so will you_.

* * *

Something shifted when I lost it over wanting to use the car when she was at work. The last hit had me sailing and in that unreasoning place where it was her fault that she couldn’t immediately make a vehicle appear when I wanted one. I couldn’t yell at her, couldn’t blame her directly. I could break things, though. I did. I broke plates, shattered a kitchen chair to kindling, scattered books on the floor and did my best to rip one of her fleece throws in half–those things have no weave to them! They’re almost impossible to rip on a line. I had just reached a teapot from the top of the fridge when she came home. I heard the car and decided I’d had enough. The teapot shattered like a grenade against the door and I heard something I had never heard before: Batgirl screamed.

The door slammed open, scattering the broken porcelain across the hardwood and she came in at a run, her eyes wide and her hands up to fight. “Trevor!?” When she saw me, she stopped with a sigh and put her hands down. “You’re okay.”

I stared at her. She was standing in the ruins of her house, looking at the man to blame for that ruin and she was fucking worried about me? “Fuck you!” I shouted at her and reached for something else to throw. My hand landed on the apples set out to ripen on the counter and I chucked one at her head.

When she dodged it, she finally seemed to look down at the pieces of teapot at her feet. Her face changed in a way I had never seen. Her eyes widened and then her whole expression seemed to fold in on itself as she slowly crouched, then got to her knees and picked up the broken spout, still recognizably shaped like a petunia. Her hands were shaking. She said something but it was so quiet that I couldn’t hear her. Suddenly, she was on her feet and screamed at me, “Well? Was it!?”

I had found her limit and the result was awesome. She stormed towards me, still clutching the broken pottery. “What the fuck did you get from breaking my things, Trevor? Huh? Tell me! Did it help you? I hope it did because–” She broke off and the tirade strangled on a sob. She looked down at the spout again and then turned to whip it sharply against the wall where it shattered into further tiny shards. “–that was my grandmother’s!”

The crazy part of me, the high part of me was satisfied, almost smug at having finally pushed her to the limit of her ability to accept punishment. The rest of me was utterly ashamed. I watched as she dropped back down to the floor and sobbed herself out into her hands. I wanted to apologize, to clean up, to take every tiny fragment of that teapot and glue it back together again if it would heal some of the hurt I had caused her. Instead, the high part of me laughed. “Get out,” she said. I didn’t move. “Now, Trevor. I don’t want to see you.”

“You let the rabid dog in. Can’t get too pissed when he bites.”

“Get out!” She surged to her feet and I had the limited sense to be briefly afraid of her. “Now or I swear to god, I’ll neuter you myself. OUT.”

I went, that crazy fucking part of me still laughing like the rest of me wasn’t as shattered as that teapot.

* * *

I took the car. I drove out, found the guy who’d sold to me in the first place. Sold everything back. Sold him all my shit, except one more hit. I left that hidden against ultimate weakness. I was done with this. I wanted that crazy fucker who laughed at her pain to die a slow, agonizing death. More than I wanted any substance, any high, I wanted to kill the part of me that enjoyed seeing her rage and her grief.

I was gone for a long time. When I came back, the lights were all off. She hadn’t left so much as a porch light on for me. I parked the car and climbed out, walked up to the front porch. Sitting in a tidy pile in front of the door was a pillow, one of the heavy fleece blankets from the couch, two bottles of water and a plastic baggie with half a cold pizza inside. I closed my eyes and nodded. It shouldn’t surprise me that she didn’t want me back inside the house. It did surprise me that she had bothered to feed me. I wrapped myself in the blanket and ate the pizza, drank the water. I curled up on the porch and thought about sleeping.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because the sound of the door closing woke me. I sat up and looked around. There was a plate on the doormat with a peanut buttered bagel, half an apple and a cup of coffee. The bagel and the coffee were still steaming in the cool late spring air. Something in my chest ached and I looked up toward the window that overlooked the porch. There was no movement; she wasn’t watching to see if I ate. I ate the apple first, then the bagel. The coffee was just as good as it always was, but I realized that something was missing: her. I wasn’t used to eating breakfast alone anymore. I liked eating with her.

The basement door opened, then shut again and I listened to her footsteps as she climbed the hill through the grass. She didn’t look at me when she reached the car, just climbed inside and drove away. When I had finished my breakfast, I stood up and tried the front door. It opened. I leaned my forehead against the door and tried not to cry about it. I couldn’t believe she was still letting me back inside. I went inside with the blanket under one arm and the pillow over my shoulder, the plate and mug balanced in my other hand.

She had swept, mopped and vacuumed. There was a handwritten note on the island: “8 salad plates, 2 dinner plates, 4 snack plates, 2 salad bowls, 1 soup bowl. One kitchen chair. One 85-year-old heirloom teapot.” I closed my eyes. A bill. Entirely fair. There was something else at the bottom and I blinked before reading it: “Thank you for not breaking the mugs.”

In all of this, she still found some way to thank me.

When she came home, I made sure there was fresh coffee in the pot. I had tried to make pasta, but the noodles were mushy and I overcooked the chicken. She came in and headed for the shower without looking at me and I stayed out of her way. After a long time, she called softly, “Trevor?”

I stuck my head out of my room. “Yeah?”

“Was it useful?”

I closed my eyes and leaned my cheek against the doorframe. “Yes,” I replied quietly. “I saw someone in myself that I don’t want to be again.”

“Then it was worth it.”

I chuckled and shook my head. “No, it wasn’t. It was worth three dinner plates and a soup bowl. Maybe the chair. But not the teapot. Not the rest of it.”

Her hand stroked my face and I blinked, surprised. I hadn’t heard her walking toward me. “It was worth it,” she whispered and stood on her toes to kiss me.

* * *

Deciding to go clean was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life.

It was brutal. I had spent the last twelve, fifteen years using. That first three days when everything was clearing out of my system, I felt like I was emptying out and it was terrifying. In that empty space was someone I didn’t know, wasn’t sure I’d like to get to know even if I wanted to allow him to survive. He had a voice like mine, a sense of humor like mine, but he was someone new, too.

The physical shit was worse than a nightmare. Itching, hallucinations, spiders under my skin. Restlessness, something very much like mania from what I’ve read since, nausea. The emotional was terrifying, too. Cravings drove me to wild rages unlike anything I could ever remember. I was repeatedly trapped inside my body while I screamed at her, called her every name any woman would hate to be called. I stripped her bare emotionally more than once and I felt powerless to stop myself. She still forgave me. I spent hours pacing in the fields, screaming myself hoarse against the Greek chorus of my father and brother and Michael telling me that this was pointless and I should just give up and die. I clawed my skin raw chasing spiders that weren’t there until Batgirl calmly took my hands from me, clipped my nails short, dabbed antiseptic on the worst of the scratches and let me go again. I called her a neutering bitch for it, but she just smiled and said something about feral cat colonies.

When the rages and mania passed, there was something very like nothing. I stopped. For so long, I had been going and going because I couldn’t stand to not be and now, I couldn’t imagine a reason to continue that forward movement. So I stopped. I stopped taking second helpings, then stopped eating altogether in spite of the incredible hunger that kept gnawing on me. I stopped showering, stopped shaving and brushing my teeth even when Bee reminded me of the rules. I stopped getting dressed. I stopped getting out of bed.

I stopped.

I don’t know how long I was like that. I stopped keeping track of time.

It was in the depth of that suspended animation that Bee came and sat on the edge of my bed. Her hand was gentle on my face and I relaxed under her touch, not every realizing there had been tension in me anywhere. She traced my eyebrow with her thumb, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Trevor,” she whispered and I tilted my head to follow her voice. I didn’t open my eyes, didn’t see the point. “This is depression. You need to get help for this. I need you to get help.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll die otherwise.”

“Wouldn’t be so bad.”

“It’d be a mess for me.”

That made me open my eyes and I squinted at her in the dim light. She was wearing her black fluffy robe and I found myself reaching out to touch the edge. “Would it?” She nodded and I said, “Huh.” It hadn’t occurred to me that my death would be a problem for her. I tried to focus on that because it meant something and I wasn’t sure what anymore. I’d stopped thinking deeply, too.


	4. Chapter 4

I thought it was a few hours later when I got up and wandered into the living room, but the way she looked at me said something else. She got up from the couch and crossed to me, her eyes wary and worried. “How are you feeling?” she asked me.

“Itchy,” I said honestly and scratched my fingers into the beard that had grown while I Rip VanWinkled. It was patchy at best, the way it usually was and mostly just made me feel grosser than usual. When I met her eyes, I realized my choice of words may not have been the best. “Not that kind of itchy,” I added quickly. “Just… itchy.” I gestured to my face.

“Hungry?” she asked quietly.

“No.” I looked at the door to the bathroom for longer than necessary, then started toward it. “I’m gonna shower and shave. This shit’s disgusting.” 

Before the door swung shut after me, she said, “Want company?”

_ Better not. You’ll just hit her again. _ I tried to ignore my father’s voice and shook my head. “I’m alright.” I took a few minutes to shave. It’s really hard to shave without looking at yourself. I managed mostly by touch. Once I was in the shower, I looked down in something like horror. I’ve never been real macho or pumped up about how I look, but I looked like shit. I could see my ribs above a pot belly that I didn’t remember being that bad before. My chest looked sunken and my skin sort of sagged. “I look like an addict,” I said to myself, half amused and half horrified. I soaped myself clean, washed my hair and tried not to notice how much of it slipped away down the drain. As I was letting the water drain, I looked down at myself again and frowned. How long had I been out? I re-acquainted myself with my dick-- _ Your only real friend. Shut up, Dad. _ \--and when I was sure all the plumbing seemed in order, I toweled off and got out of the shower. I reached for the clothes I had been wearing and was surprised to find them gone, replaced by clean shorts, a pair of sweatpants and a clean t-shirt. Sometimes she was like a fucking house elf.

In the living room, I found Batgirl curled on the couch and watching a TV show that seemed vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it. It looked like one of those police procedurals. She looked up at me when I leaned on the back of the couch and I tried not to see the concern and hope in her eyes. Those eyes seemed bluer than I remembered. Is it possible to get a Tide treatment on eyes? “Better?”

I nodded. I did feel better. Cleaner, at least. I looked down at my hands and realized they were shaking. Nothing itched right now, but I suspected the spiders would be back if I stayed awake too much longer. “I’m not dead,” I said. It came out like an accusation and I tried to bite it back.

“You’re not,” she agreed. “I’m glad.” I snorted and she came up to her knees on the seat of the couch. Her arms curled around me where I stood behind her couch and she pressed her face into the hollow place in my chest, just above that potbelly I was trying not to think about. “I missed you.”

I tried to breathe normally, but it hitched in strangely and I pulled out of her arms. She reached after me for a split second and her eyes were sad. “You have serious damage,” I informed her. “And you say I’m the one who needs help.”

“You are.” She settled against the back of the couch again, just her chin resting on the back while she hugged her arms around herself. “I’ve gone and gotten mine. I’m still getting better.” When I stared at her, she shrugged with a small smile and said, “Chronic major depression, generalized anxiety disorder with social anxiety, severe dopamine deficiency and poor social conditioning. Prescribed 50mg Prozac, 300mg Wellbutrin, cognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapy and continued monitoring by mental health professionals. Which means weekly therapy visits and quarterly meds check-ups.” 

She had damage. She really did. I couldn’t process it. For as long as I had been here with her, I still could not grasp how someone as calm, as content, as visibly happy as she was could still hide the suicidal maniac I had seen in her journals. I couldn’t imagine how any doctor-approved medicine could course-correct her from the rock bottom I knew so well. How had I ended up here and she ended up there? Was it just the class divide? I thought about how fast Michael’s life had gone to shit, regardless of his living situation. Her voice whispered to me from inside:  _ I got help _ .

I shook my head slowly and turned away from her. I waved a hand dismissively at her and walked off to find shoes. This shit was beyond me and I wanted something to make it clearer again. That last hit out by the barn still called my name and this was all too much for me to handle sober. I heard her say my name, but I ignored her. When I opened the door, she said it again and there was something in her voice that haunted me. I stalked all the way out into the field, refusing to examine that haunting. I dug into the ground where I had buried the last of my stash. When my hand had closed on the plastic, I stopped.

_ Trevor. _ Her voice echoed and refracted in my head until I pressed myself into the scratchy grass and muddy clay. I screamed. I tried to scream her voice out of my head and it wouldn’t go. I wanted the crystal clarity, but I wanted her, too. I wanted to know she as safe. Safe from me maybe above all. If I fell back into this, I couldn’t make sure she was safe. I screamed again. And again. I just screamed myself hoarse with my hand tight on that little bag of clarity. 

“Trevor!” This time, her voice wasn’t in my head. Her arms were around me and her face was pressed against my shoulder. She pulled on me. She pulled on me with more than just her arms and her voice. She dragged me back and I let her. I left the crystal in its hole. She wrapped herself around me and I couldn’t find a reason to push her away. 

Michael could. 

_ You’re a worthless excuse for a human being, Trevor. Your death would be a blessing for this poor chick. You should finish what you started with that shit in the hole. Kill yourself and get it over with. Fall deep in your pit and never come out, you shitbag failure. Spare her the view of your wasted ass when you go. Clean up your mess and die somewhere she doesn’t have to look at you. _

I tried to scream again, but her hand was on the side of my face and she was kissing me. She held me against her and kissed me until the urge to scream had passed and all I could do was hold onto her. I kissed her and I fell apart in her arms. I kissed her until all my voices fell silent in my head and my fingers tangled in her hair. “Stay with me,” she whispered against my mouth. “I want you here with me. Please.”

“I don’t fucking understand,” I gasped. 

“Then don’t understand,” she whispered and when I looked at her, her face was streaked with tears. “Just stay.” 

“How?” I asked. I felt so helpless. “How am I supposed to stay? I’ll just fuck everything up for you. I’m a worthless addict with no future. You’re supposed to hate fucktards like me. You’re supposed to pity me, walk away quickly, buy me a bottle of water and a sandwich because you can’t give me money, I’d only spend it on drugs. Anything but stay close to me. The best I can do for you is die somewhere that’s easy to clean up.” 

Her forehead rested against mine and her eyes were closed when she whispered, “Marry me.” I knew I couldn’t have heard her right, so I just pretended my imagination hadn’t come up with those words. But she insisted on saying them again. “Trevor, marry me. If you’re my husband, you’re covered by my insurance. I can get you the help you need. I know you can come back from this. I… need you to come back from this. Please, let me help you.”

I stared at her in confusion. “I’m a worthless addict with a criminal record, Batgirl,” I finally said and her eyes opened to look at me. “I can’t get married. Why would you… how…?”

She leaned down and kissed me again. “It’s practical,” she said. “You need help, Trevor and I can’t do it on my own. I do want to help you. I… I think I need to help you.” We stayed there for a few seconds, just clinging to each other in the shadow of the barn. “You’re not worthless,” she said with her face buried in my neck. “You aren’t.”

 

I got help.

I made back alley deals for a new identity. Trevor Gordon. It made her smile.

I did favors. I called others in.

I told her to look the other way and I would find a way to make it work. She did, but she never let go of me. Not for a second. 

We got married. The magistrate’s office is in the county jail, which was just fucking perfect. I felt like they were going to arrest me at any second, tell me there was a mistake and I was supposed to be on the other side of the fence. I was jonesing when we were there and it was like fire under my skin. I wanted to sprint for the road, throw myself under the next car and save her from what she was doing to herself. She held my hand and her eyes never left mine when she said she would take care of me, in sickness and health. She promised to stand by me. To support me. When she kissed me with the permission of the magistrate, I kissed her back with my brain on fire and melting around me. 

Nothing made sense. But I had said those words, too. I promised to honor and cherish. To protect. To support. Part of me screamed that I didn’t have a right to say them, that I wouldn’t know commitment if I was bound to it with iron. Part of me laughed that it wasn’t commitment, that none of this was real and it was just a legal transaction, something so the doctors would write the right pills. But I kissed her like I meant every word I said. 

She got me help. I went to those doctors, let them check me over both inside and out. I came back with a surprisingly clean bill of health, actually: no AIDS, no syphilis, not so much as a case of herpes. I had never realized how lucky I was. The worst they found was high cholesterol and high blood pressure, a mild case of malnutrition, dehydration. Batgirl said I had been down almost six weeks without food, so that explained the malnutrition, anyway. One doc took a few small pieces off my ear because they “looked precancerous” and I just kind of sat there for that. Precancerous. I’d never so much as thought of dying of cancer. I had always assumed something else would get me first. 

I went to a therapist. The big scary kind with high fees and a couch. She didn’t make me use the couch, just talked to me seriously for a while about depression and bipolar disorders. She talked to me seriously about some of the best ways to shake addiction, especially if I wasn’t willing to get professional rehab. There was a lot of hinting and urging for a facility. I even brought the idea up with Batgirl. She asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted to stay with her. We threw away the brochures. The doc prescribed me medications, low dosages at first to start and then bumping them up. When some things worked and others didn’t, she rearranged things, all the while talking about finding “normal” for me. 

Normal. My normal has never been normal by anyone else’s standards. But living with Bee, I wanted normal. I wanted to feel like I could stand next to her without being afraid of hurting her. Like I deserved to be there. I wanted to feel like she wasn’t wasting her life helping me. I wanted to kiss her like she was my wife in more than just legality. 

As the medications picked at my brain chemistry, things started getting clearer. It got easier to banish my father’s voice and its constant hissing worthlessness, Michael’s invasive suicidal rants, Ryan’s maniacal urges to destroy. I started to identify them for what they were and push them away. Sleeping was easier. So was getting up again. I started feeling curious about where she lived, why she had chosen here of all places to live. I started walking across the field to meet the neighbors. I started helping with their chores and they started paying me. 

And I stayed. I stayed close to her. A few weeks after we were married officially, I came up behind her in the kitchen while she was making dinner and just put my hands on her hips. She was humming something to herself and she stopped just long enough to lean back against my chest, then continued. I realized she would let me touch her. Pretty much any time I wanted to touch her, she was open to being touched. I didn’t have to ask, though I did a lot, especially at first. She went out of her way to make sure she didn’t startle me if she was going to touch me, but I started to get used to her hands on me, too. She rubbed my shoulder if she was walking past me. I would kiss her hair when she came home from work. We showered together, just that simple act of being close to each other while we got clean. Our usual personal space zone narrowed to almost nothing at all. She fell asleep in my lap while we watched Netflix. I sat on the floor with her legs draped over my shoulders. I rode next to her in the car with my hand on her leg. Or her hand on mine. 

Slowly, the ache I had come to expect as normal started to ease. I didn’t feel like I was alone all the time. Her hand on my back was enough to remind me that I was supposed to be here, even if it didn’t make sense. 

All of the help made things easier. It didn’t make things perfect. I’m still an asshole, still twitchy and hair-trigger with my temper. I still get cravings. That last hit is still in its hole beside the barn. She knows it’s there. We don’t talk about it but I can see her thinking about it sometimes. I know she sees me thinking about it, too. But I haven’t thrown a punch in anger since I went clean. I’m proud of that.

By the time she torched the couch, I was more comfortable touching her than not touching her. We navigated the space between us with a strange balance of intuition and attention. She knew where I was. I knew where she was. We didn’t collide very often and when we did, it was intentional. 

Being with Batgirl eased my soul. I started to think of myself as having one, for that matter. Her quiet routine gave me space to do what I needed to do and find what I needed to find. Which was her and the quiet itself. When I found those rings at the antique shop, I knew I was ready to make good on my promises. I knew it was time for me to be useful, too.


End file.
